Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988

One of America's most important poets.... startingly lyrical and visceral.

—Harvard Review

Michael Palmer’s Codes Appearing combines in a single volume three of his most beautiful poetry volumes: Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, and Sun (1981, 1984, 1988 respectively, from North Point Press). Making available a great deal of Michael Palmer’s most influential, exciting, and stunning work, Codes Appearing is a landmark volume. "It is impossible," as The Boston Review noted, "to overstate Palmer’s importance." "Michael Palmer," as Joshua Clover declared in The Village Voice, "is the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation. And his books, including the essential ’80s triptych of Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, and Sun, are organized not by story but by a dreamland of calculus and sway .... [Palmer’s] genius is for making the world strange again."

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New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914 - 1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. "I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalled. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful."